Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others

Purba tripped on the edge of her red benarasi sari as she crossed the threshold of her new home. Charubala, Chhaya, Sandhya, Purnima, Jayanti, all the women of the house, were waiting at the doorstep to welcome the new bride with paddy, sandalwood paste, new grass. They bit on their tongues, swallowed their premonitions and got on with blowing on the conch-shells and making the ritual sound of jubilation, ulu ulu ulu ulu ulu .

Because there was to be no wedding ceremony on traditional lines — there was a reception in three days — Charubala had decided to treat the day of Purba’s entry into the household as an informal boü-bhaat for the family only; she made Purba serve rice to everyone. Purba, transplanted overnight, it felt to her, from a tiny, homely back garden to the immensity of a cultivated steppe, started her new life with all the animation of a machine.

By the time she was shown to her room, where the huge bed, of a size she could not have contemplated previously, had been strewn with flowers and the posters around it decked with hanging curtains of tuberose and tinsel, studded with red roses, it was four hours past her bedtime. She took up one corner of the vast land in front of her and sank instantly into an all-obliterating sleep. Her last thought before shutting down was: ‘It’s like the field beside the Double Pond back home, this bed, it will take me a very long time to roll from one end. .’

The nightmare was of a hot, heavy, unidentifiable weight, which seemed to surround her, at once over and around her, something bearing down to crush her ribs and all the breath out of her tiny, squeezed lungs. . and she could not breathe. . breathe in. . brea— She woke up to find a huge animal on her.

She screamed, or tried to. She tried again, but terror seemed to have removed her vocal cords. It was a man wrestling her down, kneading her breasts, tearing at her red-and-gold benarasi, her matching red silk blouse, trying to flip her over and keep her pinned down on the bed at the same time, a man trying to climb her as he would a ladder. She could not even begin to fight back, she was too small. The man was breathing heavily and a terrible smell was issuing out of his mouth, a smell that caught at some corner of her memory. Then, in absolute fear, she began to piss on the bed. No sooner had she finished than the man put his hand between her legs to check on the enormity of what she had just done. As soon as it was verified she was punished for it: briefly, first, with the fingers, then a cracking rod of pain fissured her in half. This time the scream emerged, but a hand was quickly clamped over her mouth as the chastisement of fire continued. Just when she thought she was going to pass out, the man spasmed and grunted, as if seized with a great pain that was going to fell him, then that too stopped and she felt the point of her bisection flooded with a momentarily warm liquid; she knew it was blood; she was going to bleed to death on her wedding night. Her husband rolled off her and fell asleep, it seemed, before the movement had come to a halt.

All she could think about was not her blood leaking out onto the flower-strewn bed, but how it would be discovered tomorrow that she had pissed on it and wet the mattress. The fear, a new kind now, and the shame released the flow of tears at last and she wept and wept, silently and motionlessly, at her absolute incomprehension of why she had been singled out for such searing pain. How long was this punishment going to last? That smell coming out of her husband’s open, snoring mouth hit the side of her face in little gusts. She suddenly knew what it reminded her of. Two years ago, just after Kali Puja, in the field beside Double Pond she had smelled something similar to this. In a corner of the grounds, loud with the buzzing of fat, blue flies, lay the blue-red entrails of the goat that had been sacrificed on the night of the puja; the meat was cooked and served to the people of the neighbourhood at a communal lunch the following afternoon. The smell of the rotting intestines had made her retch then. Now, too, she turned sideways and threw up onto the floor, her head leaning out of the side of the bed.

On our first afternoon hidden in the jungle we heard the sound of conch-shells, one after the other, until there was a kind of chorus of disharmony. Then it stopped. We knew that the police had arrived in Gidighati. The Santhal men had said that was how we were going to be warned.

Nothing happened for a good few hours. Darkness fell. We secreted ourselves deeper into the trees in a fanning circle, so that if they sent the police to the forest, they would be surrounded by us regardless of the point at which they entered. We had only one pistol, the one Dhiren had brought us, a small packet of bullets, nine tangis and three spears (none of us, the city boys, could use a spear, which required years of practice; its weight alone dragged down one side of my body). The rest of our weaponry, sickles and daggers, could only be used in close combat with an unarmed or disarmed enemy, or by stealing up from behind.

Our ears were strained so intently that we could hear every falling leaf, every scurry of a small bird or animal. Later, we picked up on raised voices, a cry or two, but maybe we imagined these. Bir had a pile of kindling ready to carry into the village so that he had a ready excuse if anyone asked what he had been doing in the forest. No one came for us. Bir left in the morning.

Dipankar and I whiled away the hours in the forest, talking about the route we were going to take to Majgeria. I didn’t know why I persisted with what I thought of as ‘one last visit’ to the village I had left behind. Part of it was, of course, the way the fates of Kanu and Bijli haunted me. But part of it was also because I couldn’t let a silence descend on us in the daylight, when I felt so naked and exposed, my face and expressions so visible.

I asked — How did you know to look for money and jewellery in mattresses and pillows?

Dipankar said — I saw a pillow leaking some cotton stuffing. Then something, I don’t know what, maybe I had felt the corner of something hard while I was tossing the pillows onto the floor, maybe I had noticed a rough line of stitching in the middle of the mattress, something made me feel the pillows again. Bundled paper, I thought. The rest you know.

Yes, the rest I knew. Suddenly, it was the word ‘rest’ that redistributed an unknown internal system of weights, hardly ever perceived, and brought an enormous heaviness to my chest that rose like a column and tried to escape through my throat and mouth, and I was sobbing like a beaten child, crying helplessly and without shame in front of someone else, my first time since the age of six or seven.

— What am I going to tell Samir’s mother? I said through my tears. How am I ever going to be able to show my face to her? We’ve left him on Nabin’s roof, there won’t even be a body to return to her.

Dipankar sat me against a tree and let me cry. He said — Be strong.

That was all he said and I was grateful to him for that.

Bir returned at night with food and water and news. The police had come to their corner of the village, rounded up about twenty men and taken them away to Jhargram. They said they were going to come back. Apparently nobody had opened his mouth, when asked about ‘some men from outside this village’.

— But the men they’ve taken away, what’s going to happen to them? Ashu asked.

Bir said — Lock-up for a few days, a little bit of beating to find out who was behind killing those dogs. The police are in their pay, so they’ll make an effort. If the dogs are all killed, who’ll pay them bribes?

— And if the men talk?

Bir laughed — No one will. Not a single one. They want to get rid of the police too. Let them come here, we’ll see to them. Not many policemen came. Before, there used to be more.